HAG News: #7
Featuring: Team news, new releases, events, craft and indie insights, and magazines currently accepting submissions.
Contents:
From the Council
Publishing News
Events
British New Releases
HAG Chat
Craft Column
Indie Business Corner
Author Highlight
Calls for Submissions
Community Notes
The British Horror Authors Guild is a professional community for independent British horror writers. Our mission is to support, connect, and empower writers working in horror and dark fiction by providing a space for shared knowledge, practical advice, and peer support.
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From the Council
A. E. Deakin, Editor
I’ve been wrestling with a new short story, Hungry, published on 4 August. This unruly beast kept trying to evolve into different tales, and I’m still not sure if its current iteration is its final form.
I’m also slowly but surely working towards bringing out a urban fantasy / comic horror novel, Hell of a Deal, later this year. Expect office drama, terrible people and put upon demonic employees.
I’ve been reading fantasy this week in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, but there are some truly dark fairy tale scenes. The idea of the Wood being a monstrous and ever consuming consciousness was very interesting.
Newton Webb, Editor, Co-Founder
Greetings, my wicked darlings!
July mostly involved the sun boiling my brain and me confusing everyone by releasing a new version of Shadow of the Wolf with the same title and similar covers. Idiot Newt. The Dark Fantasy Edition is the lighter original, while the Medieval Horror Edition is the grim rewrite set during the Anarchy. I also released Outpost U-819 Must DIE! and A Bunker Too Far.
Meanwhile, I should have been working on Tales of the Macabre, Vol. 5, but instead found myself slapping my filthy finances into shape on Xero for Making Tax Digital. Exactly what a stressed Newt needed!
I found time, somehow, to write Clarent, a horror story involving a somewhat sexual devil’s bargain, and Full Beam, a retelling of a classic urban legend. I also interviewed Ash Ericmore and look forward to interviewing David Sodergren for HAG Chat this month.
Sweet screams,
Newt
S. E. Tykka, Editor
Hello everyone.
For the last month, I’ve been rewriting an older story into a novella. It’s been fun, but also a bit stressful. I want to get the first draft finished by the end of this week, when I get my novel manuscript back from my developmental editor.
While immersed in writing, I find it difficult to focus on reading fiction. Instead, I’ve been slowly working my way through Write Naked: A Bestseller’s Secret to Writing Romance & Navigating the Path to Success by Jennifer Probst. I’ve found it quite compelling and inspiring. I’d pitch it as a motivational craft book with practical examples, but I highly recommend it, even if romance isn’t your genre.
Cheers,
S.E. Tykka
Publishing News
Written by Newton Webb
Horror continues to perform strongly in the UK print market, with record value sales reported for Horror & Ghost Stories in 2025. Traditional publishers are responding to this growth through new horror imprints and specialist lists.
Profile Books has completed its acquisition of Solaris from Rebellion Publishing. Solaris is a well-known science fiction and horror imprint.
Penguin Random House’s new 3AM Books launches its publishing programme on 27 August, while Orbit UK’s Run For It has created a new list dedicated entirely to horror. The first books are expected in Autumn 2026.
Amazon has expanded the upper price limit for eBooks eligible for the 70 per cent royalty option. Qualifying Kindle books can now be priced as high as £12.99 in the UK. Although many independently published horror eBooks appear within the £2.99 to £5.99 range, the change may benefit premium collections, box sets and longer novels.
Submission Opportunities
Several British anthology opportunities are currently available. Flame Tree Publishing is accepting submissions for its Zombie World and Cosmic Horror collections until 9 August 2026. The Fiction Desk is also handling submissions for Uncertain Stories, which is seeking contemporary supernatural fiction until 30 September 2026. We will include further information in our calls for submissions below.
AI and Authorship
Generative AI looms heavily in the community discussions, including the withdrawal of Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl and questions raised about Jerry Falade’s debut manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body. These have intensified discussion about how, and if, we should be verifying that manuscripts are human written. Both authors have denied using AI to write their books. Publishers, competitions and professional organisations are introducing more explicit policies on generative AI. As Dean Samed comments in his Jagged Social training course ‘Authenticity is the new currency in media’.
Authors can protect themselves by retaining drafting records. I personally have a terrible naming system and all my drafts are named v0.1, 0.2 etc, but it does provide a papertrail of sorts.
As AI generated or assisted books continue to flood the Amazon marketplace, we urge newer authors, particularly those without an established back catalogue or substantial mailing list, to develop sustainable methods of promotion and reader outreach. A good resource for that is, of course, our very own Indie Business Corner. All it costs to read is time.
The most important advice is to keep your self promotion efforts sustainable, as there is little point promoting yourself if it prevents you from writing consistently! Ring fence your time spent on social media. Advice on keeping a strong writing work ethic can be found in the Craft Column. In particular, How to keep on writing when you don’t want to? It also features heavily in the HAG Chat with Ash Ericmore.
B-HAG Policy on Generative AI
While it’s directly aimed at our Substack articles, this remains our policy for all B-HAG publications, promotional material and other official content:
Substack is now using Pangram to detect whether articles have been AI-assisted. While we agree in principle with being transparent when work has been created using AI, we are concerned about the accuracy of AI checkers such as Pangram, which can produce false positives. We therefore do not enable Pangram on our posts. Our articles are written entirely by humans, and we do not use AI-generated images in any of our posts.
Events
HAG Pizza, Saturday, 26 September 2026
Guild members are meeting at 14:00 at Lost Souls Pizza in Camden (245 Eversholt Street, London NW1 1BA). Join Guild members and fellow horror writers as we guzzle pizza and moan about how quickly we spent our royalties.
Let us know in advance (by 16 September 2026) if you are attending as we need to book a table by emailing us at bhauthorsguild@gmail.com.
Attendees are responsible for purchasing their own food and drinks. We don’t split the bill, so please pay separately when ordering.
Afterwards, tradition suggests that we may end up at The Black Heart public house for a few (few?!?) beverages.
Article Submission
Since the newsletter has started, two of the most popular segments have been the Craft Column and the Indie Business Corner. If you would like to feature in HAG News, then we invite you submit articles to bhauthorsguild@gmail.com .
British New Releases
Free Short Stories
HAG Chat
What happens when a heavy metal icon turns his hands to extreme horror? Ash Ericmore, author of over a hundred published books, sits down with Newton Webb to discuss.
Top HAG Chat Shorts
Craft Column
Evolution of a Scene
S. E. Tykka is a Finnish-American fantasy author writing about power, identity, and belonging. Her debut, Blade and Lyre, is available now.
Indie Business Corner
Your First 100 Amazon Reviews
Newton Webb is an English horror writer with seventeen published books, including the international best-selling series Tales of the Macabre.
Author Highlight
Jack Thackwell
Jack Thackwell is a remarkable talent, from the south coast of England, with a gift for finding looking at classic horror from new and refreshing angles.
When I read his short story The Chip, I found it to be a wonderfully subversive reimagining of the undead mythos. In relatively few words, Jack constructs a story that feels contemporary and unsettling while remaining true to the legends that inspired it. I would also like to give a shoutout to Through the Marshs for people who fancy a supernatural, folk story.
His prose has a delightful gothic quality, combining elegant description with a creeping sense of the grotesque. He is a versatile author who has published stories with extreme horror components alone with folk and classic horror.
Jack’s stories have also been adapted by The NoSleep Podcast.
He has published two books. The horror anthology If Walls Could Talk and the novella New in Town.
Recommended Story
Calls for Submissions
Flame Tree Publishing: Zombie World
remains open until 9 August 2026.
Contact: collections@flametreepublishing.com
For accepted stories we pay Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) rates of 8 cents/6 pence per word for original stories, 6 cents/4 pence for reprints.
Original zombie and undead fiction.
Story length is most likely to be successful at 2000–4000 words, but we will still read stories slightly outside this range.
Flame Tree Publishing: Cosmic Horror
remains open until 9 August 2026.
Contact: anthologies@flametreepublishing.com
For accepted stories we pay Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) rates of 8 cents/6 pence per word for original stories, 6 cents/4 pence for reprints.
Contemporary cosmic and weird horror that moves beyond simple Lovecraft imitation.
Story length is most likely to be successful at 2000–4000 words, but we will still read stories slightly outside this range.
Uncertain Stories
remains open until 30 September 2026.
Contact: Submission Form
Both The Fiction Desk and Uncertain Stories pay £25 per thousand words for the new short stories we publish (so for example, £100 for a 4,000 word story, or £150 for a 6,000 word story).
Contributors also receive six printed copies. The stories featured in Fiction Desk anthologies are also eligible to enter the Writer’s Award, a cash prize of £100 for the best story in each volume, as judged by the contributors.
Contemporary supernatural and speculative fiction, including modern ghost stories.
1,000 to 15,000 words.
£5 submission fee.
Community Notes
Did you know we have a horror writing group?
Join us on Mondays at 19:30 UK time. Bring approximately 400 words of your own work for a structured group critique.
We also run regular writing sprints on our Discord to promote a strong writing routine.